Establishing Healthy Eating Habits
For a Healthier You

Weight Loss Article: Setting Your Diet Clock

It’s two AM in the morning and you still can’t sleep.

You hear the next door neighbor’s baby bawling again, there is a whippoorwill in your front hedge that owns an overactive beak, and the train on 5th & Vine is making another midnight run for the third time tonight.

You know, that come morning, you’re going to feel worse than an un-watered garden of poison ivy.

Your Sleep Clock is closely related to your Diet Clock.

Your body gets adjusted to falling to sleep at the same time every night (or day, according to your work schedule).

Once that familiar hour hits, you begin to grow drowsy. If you aren’t able to go to bed, you’ll feel the bad effects the next day.

Daily diet acts much in the same way as our Sleep Clock. We get accustomed to eating at certain times during the day. If we miss a meal, we may get a headache, or feel dizzy, or become famished from missing our meal time.

Our body is suddenly lodged into a state of confusion. It’s thinking, "Where’s the food already? I’m ready to begin processing."

For a moment, let’s go back to the topic of Sleep. Let’s say that we are at liberty for the next year to do as we please. We begin to take several naps throughout the day. When nighttime falls, we have difficulty falling to sleep. Our Sleep Clock has sprung a spring.

Setting Regular Meal Times for Weight Loss

If we eat at times other than our regular meal times, our bodies are again tossed into the Land of Confusion.

This same cycle appears in our Diet Clock. Most people eat three meals per day with a couple of snacks in between. When a person begins to eat continually throughout the day, they are eating ‘at will’ rather than 'on demand’.

The body is suddenly thrown into the Land of Confusion again. It thinks, "Wonderful. First I have no food to process, now I am suddenly overloaded. I demand a raise!"

Let’s return once again to our Sleep Clock for comparison.

If we program our bodies to sleep through the night, we’ll feel refreshed and rested the following day. It’s not easy. Many people find trouble getting a good night’s rest.

Back to our Diet Clock. If we program our bodies to eat at specific times throughout the day, food processing proceeds at a much smoother and efficient rate. Again, it's not easy programming.

There has been a lot of speculation about eating several times per day.

Many experts claim that the metabolism performs at a more proficient level thus enhancing weight loss results. If this approach works for you, then by all means use it as a diet tool for losing weight.

If this approach causes you to take in too much food, this may not be the route for you to take.

Many times, people find that the less they are subjected to food throughout the day, the easier it is to control the amount of food they eat.

So eating small amounts of food, six or more times per day, may not be the best diet strategy for you.

So whether you decide to eat the popular ‘three meals and a couple of snacks’ per day, or six small meals per day, try to make an effort to eat each meal and snack at about the same time every day.

Your body will think, "This person is so in tune with me! Let the processing begin!"

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